A note before we get started, this story begins with a reference to the 1955 lynching of 14 year old Emmett Till.
There's also a moment in the episode in which a guest describes being called the n word.
This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Every two years, the Whitney Museum in New York hosts a special exhibit featuring contemporary american art.
The show is a big deal.
It draws crowds from around the world and can turn artists into stars.
But in 2017, one painting in a fifth floor gallery prompted a barrage of criticism over race and appropriation.
The painting was called Open Casket.
Its artist Dana Schutz's interpretation of a famous photograph of Emmett Till.
He was the young black boy brutally beaten and killed by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.
His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket funeral so the world could see what these men had done to her little boy.
Decades later, she described the moment in a documentary, the untold story of Emmett Lewis Till.
I said, I want the world to see this because there's no way I could tell this story and give them the visual picture of what my son looked like.
The photograph of Emmett Till in the open casket remains a painful but powerful touchstone for many, a reminder of the suffering produced by racial injustice.
Dana Schutz, who is white, interpreted the photo in a way that was more abstract but also disturbing.
Emmett Till's suit is crisp and pristine.
The brutality inflicted on his face is represented with slashing strokes of browns and reds.
Shortly after Schutzs painting appeared at the Whitney, dozens of artists of color demanded that it be removed and destroyed.
The photograph of Emmett Till, they felt, was not open to interpretation by a white artist.